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Las Vegas Becomes as Much Liszt as Liberace

The soaring lobby of Reynolds Hall at the center, which opened in March.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — It rises two miles from the flash and hustle of the Strip: a swirl of Italian marble, Indiana limestone, Venetian marble and zebrawood, topped by a 16-story campanile with 47 bronze bells. There is an acoustically tuned stage designed for orchestras and Broadway shows, a warren of grand chambers with inlaid wood and sweeping desert views, and Art Deco touches meant to recall the last ambitious engineering feat in the Nevada desert — the Hoover Dam.

When the Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened in Las Vegas in March, Jennifer Hudson was on the program and Neil Patrick Harris was the master of ceremonies. But it was Joshua Bell, the classical violinist, who drew the most applause from the homegrown audience, cheering what seemed a moment of arrival for a city whose cultural association is more likely to be Liberace than Liszt.

“That was the defining moment for me: Yup, they got it,” said Elaine Wynn, the former wife of Steve Wynn and a director of Wynn Las Vegas, recalling the emotion that swept over her as the audience applauded. “For me to go see Yo-Yo Ma and the Brazilian guitarists in Las Vegas — I mean 20 years ago, that was unheard of.”

For more than 25 years, Las Vegas has laid claim to being the entertainment capital of the nation. But it has presented a very specific kind of entertainment — elaborate, mass-market, big-ticket showstoppers like Cirque du Soleil, Elton John, Celine Dion and Siegfried & Roy. And it has been aimed at a very specific audience: tourists who come to the Strip, as opposed to the people who live here.

Las Vegas had the unwelcome distinction of being the largest city in the nation without a major performing arts center. In 2010, The Daily Beast named it the dumbest of the 55 largest cities in America.

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Sydni Andrada, left, and Alexia McKimmy dressed as showgirls on the Strip, which still boasts bright lights. Now the new Smith Center for the Performing Arts presents a different side.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The Smith Center, with its dazzlingly ostentatious architectural ambition — very much in keeping with the nothing-is-too-extravagant spirit of Las Vegas — has set out to change that. The center cost $470 million and took 33 months to build. A delegation of Las Vegas civic leaders toured concert halls around the world — La Scala in Milan, the Opera House in Budapest, Carnegie Hall in New York — in search of inspiration as they conceived what was in effect their dream hall to be built on this five-acre plot on a former brownfield.

“In many ways, we’ve been the tale of two cities: the entertainment capital of the world and the city where people live with their families,” said Myron G. Martin, the president of the Smith Center. “I don’t think anyone would dispute that Las Vegas did its best job at taking care of tourists.”

“This is a community that has been on the list of the largest cities in North America without a major league sports team, an academic medical center and a world-class performing arts center,” he said. “We have now checked one of those boxes.”

Until three months ago, fans of classical music, dance and theater had to make weekend trips to Los Angeles, Salt Lake City or Philadelphia, or wait for shows to land at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“There was lots of people who simply said, ‘I don’t want to play Las Vegas,’ even though they might have been touring from Los Angeles to Denver to Salt Lake City,” said Mr. Martin, who previously worked at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, performing center.

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On the Strip in Las Vegas, where the performance center appeals to tourists and residents alike.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Oscar Goodman, the former mayor and a big booster of the project, said the Smith Center had brought a new era of sophistication for Las Vegas, though, he said, the process had not gone entirely smoothly.

“We may yet not be as sophisticated as we will become,” Mr. Goodman said. “Some people had had such delight for Josh Bell’s performance, they clapped before it was over. It might have been looked at with disdain by some aficionados, but next time it won’t happen.”

The first hire by the Smith Center was not the architect, but an acoustical engineering firm. And that has paid dividends: the Cleveland Orchestra’s performance of a program of Beethoven and Smetana drew raves for the acoustics in a review from the music critic of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. It ran with the presumably inevitable headline, “Cleveland Orchestra hits the jackpot in concert at Vegas’ new Smith Center.”

The project was born nearly 20 years ago in a meeting of 60 community leaders at the Golden Nugget, the Las Vegas war horse that can be seen from the balcony of the center. Even then, participants recalled, the meeting echoed with frustration over the absence of a cultural core for a relatively young city.

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“We loved, loved, loved Venetian plaster,” said Myron G. Martin, the president of the Smith Center. “And now we have it.”Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“Growing up there, the only time we could get any kind of cultural thing is when we went over to the university,” Ms. Wynn said. “We were thinking it was really time for Las Vegas to have its own.”

Donald D. Snyder, the chairman of the center’s board of directors, said that from the start, the ambition was to build a hall that would rival the Hoover Dam as “the most important project built in our lifetime in Nevada.”

“When we started talking about this 18 years or so ago,” he said, “I don’t think any of us had any idea that this was possible.”

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The financing of the project suggests the civic hunger: $150 million was donated from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Nevada whose president is Fred W. Smith, a retired newspaper executive and for whom the center is named. Fifty-seven families and individuals wrote checks of at least $1 million. Another $150 million is to be raised through a tax on car rentals, approved by the State Legislature.

At the end of their visits to concert halls, the Las Vegas civic delegation was most impressed by the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, and hired its architect, David M. Schwarz. But the center drew inspiration from everywhere, with a wish list of flourishes and materials coveted at other halls.

Mr. Martin seems a particularly fitting bridge between the two Las Vegases: he came here 15 years ago from New York, where he ran the concert and artist division of Baldwin Pianos, to take over the Liberace Foundation and Museum.

“I had an aisle seat at Carnegie Hall,” Mr. Martin said. “I had an aisle seat at Lincoln Center. It was part of my life. And to move here and not have those opportunities, it was a real gap.”

Correction: August 11, 2012

An article on July 8 about Las Vegas’s new Smith Center for the Performing Arts, which will bring more upscale entertainment to the city, misstated the source of the tax that will help finance the center. It is a tax on car rentals by nonresidents, not an airport car rental tax. A reader pointed out the error on July 14 in an e-mail; this correction was delayed for research.

Correction: July 11, 2012

An article on Sunday about Las Vegas’s new Smith Center for the Performing Arts, which will bring more upscale entertainment to the city, misidentified the building that most influenced the planners of the Smith Center. It is the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth — not the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas at Austin.

Correction: July 10, 2012

Because of an editing error, an article on Sunday about Las Vegas’s new Smith Center for the Performing Arts, which will bring more upscale entertainment to the city, misidentified, in some editions, the person for whom the center is named. He is Fred W. Smith, a retired newspaper executive — not Frederick W. Smith, the founder of FedEx.

A version of this article appears in print on July 8, 2012, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Las Vegas Becomes As Much Liszt As Liberace. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe